Introducing Game Developer Tools (Gaming SDK, Adobe Scout, FlasCC)

I am really excited about what happened tonight. We just announced the introduction of the Adobe Game Developer Tools on Creative Cloud. You can read the official announcement here. As part of this, we are introducing three new products: Adobe Gaming SDK, FlasCC and Adobe Scout, which I have been working on for a year now.

Here is a video about Adobe Scout and why it is going to change everything for your as a developer:

We also wanted to provide a great out of the box experience for developers to get started with the technology. Provide a nice package that allow developers to get up and running quickly without having to hunt for the frameworks needed, the compilers and right documentation. That's why we are also introducing the Gaming SDK:

The Gaming SDK contains the key frameworks you guys need to use to create fast performing 2D and 3D GPU games, but also much more, from the ATF tools to iOS ANEs.

Starling, Feathers and Away3D are officially supported by Adobe and part of the Gaming SDK. It provides to you a one stop shop package to get started with the technology, we hope you guys will enjoy it! For those of you guys doing native development and interested in porting native games to the desktop, you can now use FlasCC (formerly named Alchemy), which is now release quality and supported.

Comments (19)

Szymon Brych wrote:

Wow, it looks really exciting. It seems that Scout will prove super useful at performance-focused stages of games development. However the thing that I am most curious about as a developer is what are you guys actually doing with VM and this mysterious AS Next mentioned in White Papers.

it seems that the whole purpose of scout app is to advertise adobe creative cloud, which is a shame because I hope that it will be available also to those that do not wish to be part of the creative cloud in the future.

Adding to the first question…
I have a simple Stage3D application using my own engine.
The application is rendering quite a few triangles (around 5 mil).
But its constant, because nothing is moving nothing is changing after I’ve loaded and parsed my model.
Static camera, and static meshes being rendered.

Checking the performance of this application using Scout, I noticed that the DisplayList’s “Copy to screen” inclines for ~150 frames (around 5 seconds) from about 70% until it uses about 90% of my 33ms budget…

My question is what causes it to incline like that?
Especially since I’m doing the same thing every frame after loading and parsing the model.

I also noticed just doing something as simple as hovering over the close tap button on my browser causes Scout to spike certain things…

I’m glad to see Adobe introducing new tools to financially sustain the Flash platform. I’ve spent the day playing with Scout, and it’s helped me make a couple of worthwhile performance improvements in my current project.

I’m all in favor of the gaming SDK as well and would like to see Adobe continue to add libraries here to add value.

@HB
The operations it helped me identify related to audio processing and the approach I was using for some animations. My application has some gaming elements, but I wouldn’t classify it as a game in the usual sense.

The things Scout showed me were things that I was already aware I could improve. Where it was really valuable was in quantifying how much of an issue various things were. For example, I’m doing a lot of number crunching for pitch detection and things, and before looking at Scout, I had always imagined that this would be where I should focus my optimization time. But that turned out to be a non-issue in the bigger picture.

Its a good start and good direction especially with monetizing .ane’s. But giving Starling,Feathers and Away3D maybe as base but far from game developer’s framework and API, which should include FuzzyLogic, AI, Physics, MapEditor, FinalState, Routing system,….
and adding ability in FlashIDE like real time editing and replay and back and forth in time…
Its a era of visual programming and you offer far from good and fast FlexBuilder editor.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&feature=player_embeddedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=caux7Uh2BK0
Nuck nuck Dear product managers and decision makers in Adobe of all kind….
Please if my tone is bit offensive but there were and is lot of inertion in the Adobe.

I love that you gave us free ANEs but good god, where is the documentation?!?! Yeah sure you have livedocs of the methods, etc but where is the high level “this is used for that” documentation? For example, why would I want to use “StageAd” and for what purpose?

What is TestFlight and why is the ANE called “BetaTesting” instead of TestFLight? What’s it for? …